Business columnists

As U-T San Diego’s business columnist, I look forward to sticking my nose into just about everybody’s business: the economy, regulation, capital, investing, real estate, manufacturing, technology … you name it. So it’s only fair that anybody should be able to poke around in mine. Contact info To reach me, please feel free to call my desk line, 619-293-1280, or email me at dan.mcswain@utsandiego.com. I try to respond to every message from readers and news sources, but I quite often don’t respond to marketing or public relations pitches. No gifts, please I don’t accept cash, gifts, trips, meals or any other compensation from potential news sources, although I do drink coffee or water if it is generally available to guests at news events without charge. If I write a column that might directly involve a personal investment, I will be sure to disclose it. Investments and other holdings My personal investments include stocks, bonds and real estate. I am predominantly a value investor, but sometimes I do stupid things, such as improving a home beyond its market value during an ...

Dan McSwain is the U-T’s new business columnist There’s nothing like economic crisis to focus the mind. My first glimpse came as a teenager, when my dad insisted I tag along as he stalked machinery auctions. It was the early 1980s. Jobs were evaporating by the millions as factories closed by the thousands in what became known as the Rust Belt. Although his borrowing cost was 20 percent a year, my father was suddenly able ...

Remember “peak oil,” the worry that the world would run out of hydrocarbons soon enough, that we had reached the halfway point back in 1971, according to oil industry prognosticator M. King Hubbert, or that we certainly will by 2020, if you believe the optimists? That was before fracking made the United States the Saudi Arabia of oil and natural gas and also scrambled the balance of future energy supplies from Asia to Brazil to ...

Talking about the puzzle of startup investing, a famous Harvard Business School professor once said, “There is no perfect deal, but some deals are more perfect than others.” The perfect deal, he said, is a post office box to which people just simply sent checks. I have come to the conclusion that the next best thing to that is the conference business followed closely by the “giving advice business.” Ah, the conference business. There is ...

Evel Knievel once jumped 14 buses, but when he tried to cross the chasm — when he tried to jump the Snake River Canyon — he crashed, broke 11 bones and nearly drowned. This chasm thing is not so easy. Entrepreneurs often build a cool product that they and their pals think is great. They get some early adopters, a little traction, some buzz in the tech blogs, and then reality shows up — also ...

The view is long from the top of UCSD’s Atkinson Hall and optimistic. “The last 30 years have been spectacular,” says Dick Atkinson, dubbed the school’s entrepreneurial president, “but the next 30 will be stunning.” Atkinson was the chancellor of University of California San Diego from 1980 to 1995. The building, which houses the Calit2 Innovation Center, is named for him. He was president of all the UCs from 1995 to 2003 and before that ...

Big innovation requires big new thinking, and big pharma knows that simply throwing big billions of dollars at a problem isn’t efficient and effective. How they’re shaking things up was the topic of a recent seminar sponsored by Prescience International and Janssen Labs at Janssen’s San Diego incubator facility. In the past, new pharmaceutical products have primarily come from their own internal research and development, mergers and acquisitions, research partnerships with biotech companies, and corporate ...

Making the best product is never enough to ensure success. The world needs to know what you’re doing, and the media — traditional, new and social — is instrumental in telling your story. Helping startups understand how to work with the media was the topic of a recent San Diego Startup Circle event at which Barbara spoke. In her early career, when more people read print newspapers, Barbara was a business writer for the Sacramento ...

On our recent trip to Philadelphia, we met two fascinating entrepreneurs — who ironically lived across the street from each other. One was Albert C. Barnes, M.D., and the other was Benjamin Franklin. While both are not alive, their entrepreneurial legacy lives on. Barnes was a physician and chemist — he never practiced medicine but rather was a lab rat — who in 1912 invented an early anti-gonorrhea drug called Argyrol, and it proved to ...

The 100-meter sprint takes less than 10 seconds. But on the last weekend of the Olympics, another group of 50 competitors began their own sprint — a 54-hour new business creation sprint, from Friday night to Sunday afternoon. Welcome to San Diego’s first Startup Weekend for Military Families and Veterans held at the San Diego Hall of Champions in Balboa Park. Begun in 2007, the Seattle-based nonprofit Startup Weekend has held more than 500 events ...